Being an online retailer does come with a lot of challenges, but it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to turn your business into a successful one. The key is to build a strategy that will help you beat your competition and ensure that you achieve your goals. Building a successful eCommerce website is an essential part of that strategy and your entire website’s design is exactly what will help you level the playing field in the crowded market of today’s digital world.

People are opting for online shopping more and more, instead of visiting brick-and-mortar stores. Therefore, launching your own eCommerce website gives you the upper hand on the market, so you should learn how to do it properly in order to turn profits. There are some must-haves for every successful eCommerce website that can make or break your business, so take a look at what those are before you launch your online store.

Ease of Use

If your eCommerce website is not designed well and its architecture is not aligned with how your target customers are searching for the information about your products, your website will not yield positive results and you will struggle to generate leads and conversions.

Your website must be easy to use and your prospective buyers must be able to navigate easily and find what they are looking for in a matter of seconds. No one wants to read a manual on how to use your site or jump through hoops in order to find what they need, so you need to make sure that your site’s navigation is intuitive and every possible product you offer is easy to find.

Simplicity is an extremely important element of every website but, when it comes to ecommerce websites, it is definitely a must-have that you should never overlook. Therefore, make sure that your website is simple and easy to use and, as a result, your customers will always be satisfied.

Mobile Responsiveness

An exponential number of people tend to shop on the go, so you must enable them to do so when they are checking out your eCommerce website. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you will risk losing quite a lot of customers that prefer using their mobile devices to desktop computers.

Providing your customers with a great mobile experience is imperative, so building a mobile first strategy and investing in a responsive web design is the smartest investment you will ever have to make for your eCommerce website. It will allow the people visiting your website via their mobile devices to easily navigate through your site and make their purchases in an instant.

Not only will making your website mobile-friendly help you enlarge your customer base due to the great user experience you will provide, but it will also help your website rank higher in search engines, which will increase your online visibility and help you generate more leads.

Easy Checkout Process

The entire checkout process on your eCommerce website must be a piece of cake if you want to ensure that your customers leave satisfied after every transaction and always come back for more. Otherwise, you risk losing them and, thus, losing a lot of revenue.

The checkout experience of each and every one of your customers must be seamless, so you need to make sure that they don’t jump over hurdles to order the products they need and pay for their purchases. You need to make sure that all of the directions are clearly labelled, so that your customers can complete their transactions with ease.

What’s also important is to enable your customers to easily create accounts and to be able to log in using their social media credentials. You should also offer them an option to checkout as a “guest”.

Good-Quality Product Images

The images of your products, along with useful and descriptive information about the products, is paramount for every successful eCommerce website. No one wants to buy a product without being able to see it clearly first and without being informed about its features.

It goes without saying that the product images on your eCommerce site must be of the highest quality and you must let your customers see larger versions of the images either with a zoom function or with a lightbox. Furthermore, they should be able to see the product from each side and you should also include a gallery of images, so that all of the features can be shown clearly.

Social Media Buttons

Nowadays, a great number of online purchases are accomplished after searching through social media sites. Since the majority of people are using social media daily, you can reach out to many prospective buyers by adding social media buttons on your eCommerce website.

You will enable your customers to share information about your products on their social media accounts, which will help you extend your reach and enlarge your customer base, since more and more people will become familiar with your online store.

By implementing social media buttons on your eCommerce site, not only will you get more customers and avoid missing out on huge returns, but you will also provide your business with an excellent opportunity for self-promotion. Social media marketing is one of the fastest and most effective types of marketing nowadays, so make sure you use it to its full potential.

Page Load Time

One of the main benefits of eCommerce is convenience. If you cannot provide your customers with the most convenient experience, they will certainly abandon your online store. One of the most crucial elements of a successful eCommerce website is its page load time.

Nothing is more frustrating than a website that takes forever to load, especially during the transaction process, so make sure you optimize your page load time. Your web hosting provider can help you deal with that, so you should do your research before choosing one for your eCommerce website. Make sure you check out the customer reviews of the best web hosting companies, so that you can make the right decision and pick the best service for your needs.

By including all of these aforementioned components of a successful eCommerce website, you can be certain that you will generate more leads and, thus, generate quite a lot of revenue. These are the most important elements of every eCommerce website, so make sure you combine all of them in order to make the perfect blend that will lead your online business to success.

About the author

Duke Vukadinovic works for FirstSiteGuide.com. He is passionate about the Internet world and can be of great to help web newbies build many successful blogs in various niches.

Does your business have a website? Do you think it resonates with your target audience? Or do you think it is just serving the purpose of creating a digital footprint?

Most business websites don’t convert as much as they should. Even if they list down all their features, attractive pricing models, how it works, etc. Unfortunately, the copy is not the only thing that matters. It is the design that showcases the copy and makes it work.

So here are 5 fundamentals of creating a compelling and converting web design.

According to a survey by Venture Beat, conversion rate optimization is one of the most important aspects of modern day content marketing. And the ever increasing competition of businesses on the web just backs it.

Marketers today are striving to become more creative in content marketing and that’s exactly where conversion rate optimization comes in. But with just about everyone out there trying to optimize their conversions, how do you stand out?

Here are the top conversion rate optimization trends for 2016 that you can adopt before anyone else does!

I am totally agree with all of the tricks you have mentioned here, specially about the mobile responsiveness. As the mobile users are increasing more day by day so it is needed to optimize the website fully for mobile users.